By Rob Holbert Managing Editor

You know it’s a tough political race when even little old ladies have to hire lawyers.

That’s how bad it’s gotten as Mobile County School Board President Fleet Belle thrashes around trying to save his $12,000-a-year job. Most people wouldn’t fight this hard for a job that pays less than $33 a day. But that’s another issue.

If you didn’t see the story in the Press-Register June 11, a senior citizen named Angelite Foster signed a complaint against Belle’s runoff opponent Levon Manzie. Foster’s complaint says Manzie was late filing his statement of economic interest with the Alabama Ethics Commission and that he submitted the wrong finance form for to the Probate Court. Fleet himself followed up two days later with his own complaint against Manzie.

But the complaints really aren’t the issue here. They’ve already been determined to be essentially a waste of time and energy and a political party issue. The real issue is the way all this mess went down. That gets us back to Angelite Foster.

Apparently Fleet and his boys didn’t bother to brief Foster on the proper way to run a game on someone, and when the intrepid P-R reporter asked her who helped file the complaint, she named names. The names she named were the really interesting part. According to the story, Foster said school board attorney Frank Taylor helped her write the filing, which apparently contains enough legal jargon to make it unlikely to have been written by a senior citizen who lives in public housing. (Not that you can’t learn plenty from watching reruns of “Matlock,” but he didn’t have many episodes dealing with campaign filings.)

Taylor is a member of the Atchison Firm, which rakes in north of 700 grand annually for representing the system. In 2005-2006, they billed more than $1 million to the school system and in 2006-2007, they did more than $800,000. So this pays for more than a few nice pens, hot secretaries and fancy suits. Law firms love cash cows like representing school boards or getting Kenny Stabler out of DUIs because they’re reliable sources of income.

From what I understand, there are currently flat bids before the superintendent that would drastically reduce the system’s legal fees, if they went with another firm, but that would require the school board’s action. Needless to say, hanging onto the school’s business is good business for the Atchison Firm.

So when Miss Foster named Taylor as her helper, it apparently set off more than a few alarms. It looked like – mind you LOOKED like (MY lawyers tell me I needed to write that) – some high-priced legal mouthpiece for the school board was trying to do anything he could to help his meal ticket get back in office. After all, a new board member or two and Atchison could be out on their briefcases.

This is when things get even sillier. Suddenly two other lawyers, John White and Jim Vollmer, piped up to claim Foster is their client, according to the P-R story. So now this senior citizen living in public housing has TWO lawyers. That Bush Stimulus Package must really be something! (I’m sorry, but that sounds vaguely dirty.) They refused to say who’s paying them.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, Miss Foster also told the P-R it was Belle’s campaign that helped her get the initial filings on all of Fleet’s opponents and instructed her to go to Taylor. Naturally Belle’s campaign denied all of this to the reporter, but it looks like the cat was already out of the bag.

If anything, this sad story is just another glaring sign of Fleet Belle’s ineptitude and lack of credentials to lead the school board. Imagine what people in other cities will think when they see our school board president runs such bush league scams on his political opponents. I’m pretty sure Fleet put more thought into acquiring his latest 4-foot-long pocket hankie than he did this lame scandal.

The facts are these – Fleet may have won the plurality in the first election, but the total number of people who voted for someone other than him was far more than the number who voted for him, which in plain English means he should be sweating like a hooker sitting in the front row of his church on Sunday morning.

He’s running a school board that ousted a popular superintendent and replaced him with a much higher priced guy who so far seems to be shaping out to be a bit soft when dealing with his masters on the board. (For example, he told this reporter in mid May he’d recommend firing a former principal who poured school money into his own personal church. That was a month ago, and that former principal, who enjoys great support from Belle and Hazel Fournier, is apparently still getting paid.)

Now I don’t know Levon Manzie, but it seems to me practically anyone is a better choice than Fleet Belle. As we reported here last month, Belle has all sorts of personal financial problems, as does the church he runs. They’ve got more tax problems than Wesley Snipes.

In short, I’m not really sure what Fleet Belle brings to the school board table. He doesn’t appear to be a particularly good fiscal manager. He’s already used the position to get family members sweet deals and better jobs, and he doesn’t even know how to run an airtight scam on his political opponent. If nothing else, we at least deserve someone who’s a bit cleverer in the games he plays.

The kids deserve to have a school board president who, even if he can’t balance a checkbook, is at least smart enough to cover his ass when he’s trying to use school board lawyers to do his dirty work. The next generation of penny-ante local politicians is out there in our school system right now watching and learning.

I weep for the future of political shenanigans if Fleet Belle serves as their example.

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Rob Holbert is Lagniappe managing editor. Contact him at rholbert@lagniappemobile.com.

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